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#1
JUN 08 |
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You who would learn the wisdom of hidden things and traverse the avenues of shadow beneath the stars, heed this song of pain that was chanted by one who went unseen before you that you may follow the singing in her voice across the windblown sands that obscure the marks of her feet. Each who goes into the Empty Space walks alone, but where one has gone another may follow.
He had read everything that he could conjure, from the ancient parchments of a thousand dead civilizations through to the modern musings and philosophies of today’s mystical elite. He pulled books from the ethers of extinction, long lost words untranslatable for any other man in this or any current reality. He had accumulated knowledge well beyond the capacities of his own mind and still he had little chance to hope.
Doctor Fate had nothing but the abandoned Helm of Nabu and the nearly useless Amulet of Anubis. All he had lived for, all that he had loved was gone. As perhaps the universe’s most potentially devastating mystic, he was of no use to anyone, much less to the lost.
Friends were gone or he had forgotten them. Enemies stayed from his path, never thinking him to stop them. The power within him that he had gained as Doctor Fate was minimized to a single achievement. His previous life was washed away from his memory; he had but one desperate goal.
Months had passed and he had not spoken; alone for so long, he missed only one thing. He had been locked within the cellars and depths of his own tower franticly searching for the most elusive of incantations; the impossible spell. Through the millions of pages and ethereal texts that he had studied, little help came but for a few mentions of a singular intriguing possibility.
He learned of a place called the Empty Space. Throughout a four thousand year period, it was mentioned seven times in various and unrelated histories. A whisper in the secret vault deep within a buried catacomb beneath the Sahara, a simple children’s story for women to get their offspring to behave, a taboo subject deleted from the chronicled history of the lost civilization of Mu. A forbidden place written of in a chapter of the Holy Bible that no one was ever meant to read.
Doctor Fate (he hardly thought of himself as Hector Hall anymore) had seen terrible things in his recent life, from his resurrection from the dead to learning of the falsification of his beloved wife’s existence. It was the latter that drove him to what he had become; a shell of a man, a dwindling ember within the garments of a once powerful visage. He would regain the living soul of his dead wife or he would die. Nothing else mattered. It was that state of mind that drove him to what would change the face of reality forever.
No one knew who he was or where he came from, but everyone he met knew that whatever he had to say was imperative to hear. He said nothing of unimportance and often showed his presence when great dread loomed on the horizon. He had no name for which to call for him, he only arrived when it was destined. He was a Stranger that so many had acquainted, yet no one knew.
The Tower of Fate had fallen into disrepair, an immense obelisk of mystery and anonymity with no physical entrances, crumbling where it stood between folds of the dimensions. No man could enter, but the Phantom Stranger was no ordinary man if he was indeed a man at all. As he levitated inches above the quagmire of the mist and bog around him, he waved his hand wordlessly and entered into the Tower.
The brim of his hat shadowed his facial features as he moved through the labyrinthine confusion of the tower’s interior. Up was down and sideways, down was diagonal and equally as puzzling. It seemed as nothing to the Stranger as he went straight to his objective, the host and lone resident of the Tower of Fate.
“Doctor Fate!” the Stranger called out to everything within the structure, his voice carrying through the corridors and chambers of the vast arrangements. The tone he used was calm but firm, full of importance yet not urgent. It was a voice that could travel through the entire cosmos to be heard by its intended target.
The Stranger stood diagonal to the floor as Dr. Fate’s illusory image came into view. The blurred representation was faded and dull, as if Fate had trouble producing it.
“None are welcome here,” the hollow voice of Dr. Fate declared, “especially the likes of you, Phantom Stranger. You most of all.”
The Stranger stood firm despite the disorientation that was unavoidable throughout the tower as he faced the image of his host. “I must have been welcome here, Fate, or else I never could have entered,” he replied. “You know more than anyone that I only come in peace.”
“I don’t need your peace, Stranger!” Fate spat, instantly driven to anger. “Leave me be or you may force my hand!”
“You misunderstand, Fate,” the Stranger said, remaining as calm as before. “You may not need my peace but you do indeed need my assistance.”
Dr. Fate was silent for a moment, perhaps losing interest or perhaps considering the Stranger’s words. “You are not known to give assistance,” he said finally. “You only show yourself to speak cryptically and vanish indiscriminately.”
“This is different, Hector,” he responded, peculiarly using Fate’s given name. “You will need my help. I will tell you more if we were to meet face to face.”
The illusion of Dr. Fate vanished silently, leaving the Phantom Stranger alone for several moments. Ever patient, the Stranger stood; he had waited thousands of days for events to occur in times past, he could certainly wait a few minutes for Fate to physically arrive. Soon, a great door screeched open, rust particles tearing from the hinges as if the door was aged beyond its years. Dr. Fate staggered into the room slowly, as if drunken or fatigued to complete exhaustion.
“Speak,” Fate mumbled as he faced the Stranger. “I have little time for you. I must get back to my current projects with haste.”
“It will take the time it takes, Fate,” the Stranger said as he reached beneath his dark blue cloak. “No more, no less.”
From beneath his cloak, his white gloves hand pulled a small box, ornate and wooden, and held it in Fate’s direction. The box was the size of a shoebox adorned with coppery metallic trim and carved designs. The stranger said nothing until Fate moved to take it from him.
“You will meet two men,” the Phantom stranger warned. “This belongs to one of them.”
Dr. Fate took the box and weighed it in his hands. “You are mistaken,” he replied. “I have no intention of leaving this tower until I have achieved my objective. You waste your time here with me. I am no man’s courier.”
The Phantom Stranger, had he the capacity to smile, would have grinned and shook his head. “Perhaps you don’t realize the way the world works any longer, Dr. Fate. You are no longer in control of your own destiny. You, as I, are a cog in the great wheels of things beyond even my understanding. Are we all not just couriers for the ones that have granted us existence?”
Dr. Fate scoffed beneath his golden helmet at the idea. “You give me no good reason to disrupt my work here,” he said. “Why should I allow you to stay, let alone deliver this paltry gift box?”
The Stranger remained stone faced, emotionless. “You seek the Empty Space,” he began and watched Dr. Fate’s posture adjust involuntarily at the mention of the place. “One of these men that you will meet will show you how to get there. The other man will help you bring her back.”
Dr. Fate was silent as he digested the information. He shook the box gently as he considered his avenue of action. “You are not known to lie,” he spoke after a long pause, “and yet you are not known to speak so bluntly.”
“I do not lie,” the Stranger replied. “We must do as we must.”
“Then leave me to prepare,” Fate ordered as he turned from the Stranger back to his workplaces beyond the wall of reason. As Fate disappeared into a vast corridor, his long golden cloak flowing in the nonexistent wind, the Phantom Stranger let himself out of the structure, returning into the ethereal realm that birthed him.
Heavy black smoke from a fire swirled around the rock walls of a narrow cave, twisting its poisonous plumes out through a hole in the cavern’s ceiling. The crackle of the flame was drowned by the mumbling chants of the fire’s caretaker. Rattling a hollowed gourd filled with dried beans and singing indecipherably, the sun leathered man stopped instantly as he sensed he was no longer alone.
Smiling as he turned, he felt the inner twinge of a successfully fulfilled destiny. He rose from his seated position and stood before the flame.
The Phantom Stranger towered over the man, easily a foot taller, staring intently as the man aimed a pointed stick at his chest.
“I assume it has been done,” the man spoke to the Stranger, his dialect foreign to all but the Stranger. They both stood silently, the Stranger not answering.
“Your conversation is lacking,” the man said as he punctured the Stranger’s ribcage with the sharpened stick. “It is good that I no longer have a need of you, golem.”
As the stick was buried into the Stranger’s chest, his blue cloak dispersed into a mist and his flesh began to fester and melt from his skeleton. After a moment, the golem that had appeared to be the Phantom Stranger was reduced to nothing but the mound of clay of that which it had been created.
Manitou Raven poked the pile of clay with his medicine stick and smiled a yellow smile, his lips turning in ways that were long out of practice. “Dr. Fate is a bigger fool than I had foreseen,” he said to no one but himself and the ancient gods that watched over him. “It is now only a matter of time.”
Nicholas Onokentauros swallowed down his last bite of the finely sliced meat that was his dinner, washing it down with a long sip of aged red wine. Feeling mildly unsatisfied, he removed the cork from the wine bottle and poured himself another glass. Every time he dined and drank, he was left unsatisfied. Such was the life of a man with two faces.
After taking a brief drink, rolling it around in his mouth to savor the flavor of the vintage wine, he tipped the glass to his other mouth on the side of his head. As the second mouth drank, Nicholas resumed reading the book that he had gotten into before pausing to eat. Once the second mouth had consumed the entirety of the wine glass, the second face began reading a second book. Silently, this was how Nicholas Onokentauros lived his life.
Reading by the candle light as a storm rolled in from the sea, he was expecting a visitor and was growing impatient. Reading had kept his minds busy as he waited. He had not seen another living person in thirty-seven years.
“Do you think he’ll show up?” he asked himself from the side of his face.
“Of course he will,” his front face replied. “These things are set in stone. Haven’t you been listening?”
His side face grumbled. “The collar on this shirt keeps rubbing against my ear. It’s hard to hear out of the back of my head, especially when you’re talking out of the front of it.”
“You’d think you’d be used to it by now,” Onokentauros said. “Three thousand years and you still complain.”
“I will stop soon,” the second face responded. “All of our years studying and preparing are coming of age. Our guest will spin us into events that will finally free us.”
“Speaking of our guest, should we dress now for his arrival?”
The second face agreed and Onokentauros stood from his chair and grabbed the ornate cloak that hung from the golden hook of an antiquated coat rack. He swung it over his shoulder and pulled the hood to cover his head. He walked across the small circular room and surveyed himself in the mirror. He grinned menacingly to himself then smiled at the impressive menace that he could fake. He appeared relatively normal with the hood in place; no evidence was obvious to indicate his second face.
“Just once I’d like the hood to cover your face,” the second face complained, the voice muffled by the intrusive hood.
Dr. Fate hovered in place over the coastline of a barren, lifeless land. He watched as black waves crashed into the jagged crags, leaving beached ocean life to fend off the turmoil of a waterless existence. As far as the naked eye could see, there was nothing but a sole lighthouse on the coast, towering over the turbulent waters below, its yellow light signaling to no one. That was where he was going, but he hesitated, almost nervous.
He thought over the name in his head and how he had read vague mentions of it throughout his studies. He chalked Nicolas Onokentauros up to a mere fiction, a myth among millions of years of countless others. It seemed the Nicholas Onokentauros was as elusive as the Empty Space itself. Now he knew Onokentauros was real and he was about to meet him face to face. To face.
Onokentauros had, if the stories held true, been involved in several mythologies and legends over the past three thousand years. Always present but never seen, his actions always led to others fame and fortune or doom at the hands of enemies. It was said that he did nothing for himself; he lived only to glorify or destroy others as if fate dictated his motivations. Dr. Fate paused as he considered whether his affiliation with Onokentauros would lead to glory or to his utter destruction.
As Fate hovered contemplatively, he never saw Onokentauros streak from the upper window of the lighthouse on a high speed collision course. Fate was barreled from his distraction as Onokentauros tackled him from the sky. He soon came to his senses and realized that he was being attacked as the two entangled while they plummeted to the ground.
“I seek Nicholas Onokentauros,” Dr. Fate grunted, his breath almost knocked from his lungs.
Onokentauros maneuvered gracefully to get atop of Fate as they fell, positioned so that the brunt of the impact would be absorbed by his opponent. He smiled as Fate tried to free himself from Onokentauros’ grappling hold, his hidden second face smiling even broader.
“You seek the Empty Space,” Onokentauros replied as they neared the beach below. “I am a means to your ends. I know why you’re here, Dr. Fate.”
“Then why attack me?” Fate questioned.
“If I am going to help you,” Nicholas said from his second mouth, “then first I am going to have to hurt you.”
Before Fate could reply or escape, they hit the hard ground with a staggering impact. Fate instantly lost consciousness, too busy wrestling in mid-air to counter his attacker’s assault with a field of protection. His mind too cloudy from exhaustion, his attention too diverted with thoughts of his dead wife.
Nicholas Onokentauros rose nimbly from the impact unharmed, pulling back his hood as he stood over the incapacitated Dr. Fate. He quickly unfastened the Amulet of Anubis that hung from Fate’s neck and placed it into his pocket. He then removed Fate’s helmet and stared into the blank slivers of its eyes. He studied it intently for a long moment before showing it to his other face, who studied it further.
“It is as you suspected,” the second face said. “There’s nothing in here anymore. Nabu and its prisoners have vacated the realm within the Helm.”
“That will definitely make things easier,” the first face replied.
“And also more difficult.”
“True,” the first face said. “Always on the lookout for the bright side, you are.”
“I try,” the side face said as Onokentauros knelt to Fate’s body once again, pulling the ornamented box from an invisible pocket within the lining of Fate’s cape. He held it to his front face and jiggled the contents inside.
“See?” the second face said. “It’s all going accordingly as he said.”
“Ready for our second guest?” the first face asked as he tried to place the sound of the contents inside the box. It reminded him of a box full of playing dice or a collection of small stones and pebbles.
“Let’s wake our sleeping friend first,” the second face recommended. “I’d hate for him to miss the big show. It’s not often I get to show off in front of people.”
“I know how that goes,” Nicholas said as he lowered himself into a seated position next to the fallen Dr. Fate. He crossed his legs and leaned his elbows into the sand behind him as he watched the storm clouds roil amongst themselves, clashing ribbons of lightning into each other as the formations moved. To pass the time, Onokentauros hummed a tune to himself, his other face providing a flawlessly perfect harmony.
Hector Hall crept back to consciousness in the sand, disoriented and mildly lost. It took him an uncomfortably long time to remember where he was and why he had ended up there. Rubbing his bruised ribs, he sat up. He could not see, at first glance, Nicholas Onokentauros; all he could see was the massive structure built in the sand in front of him.
“I built a sand castle while you were out,” Onokentauros said from behind Dr. Fate. “I got bored.”
He moved in front of Fate and dumped a bucket full of sand at the base of the sprawling castle, shaping it skillfully into the shape of an adjacent bungalow to the mighty fortress.
“Hope you don’t mind, I used your helmet,” Nicholas smiled as he scooped another helmet full of sand to add to the castle. In all the ways that Fate could conceive to use the legendary Helm of Nabu, a bucket was not one of them.
“I’ll need that back,” Fate said as he inspected the sand structure. It was much more complex than he had initially thought, with individual rooms within the sand windows, an interior build inside. Walls and furniture made from the sand decorated and accented everything. Dr. Fate looked closer for people.
“Amazing,” he muttered.
“Thanks,” Onokentauros replied as he continued to build. “It’s been a while since I’ve been outside. I haven’t had the opportunity to create anything in quite some time.”
Onokentauros paused and stared at Dr. Fate, who was completely enraptured in the complexity of the sand castle. The expression on Fate’s face gave Nicholas a great sense of pride. He knew that after all of these years, he still had it.
“You’re Nicholas Onokentauros,” Dr. Fate said after a prolonged silence.
“That’s correct,” Nicholas said as he dumped the remaining sand from the golden helmet and handed it back to Dr. Fate. “And since you know who I am, I’ll assume that I know why you’re here.”
“You knew I was coming?”
“I’ve known that you were coming before your parents were born,” Onokentauros boasted.
“My parents have been continually reincarnated after every life cycle for the last three thousand years,” Dr. Fate said, thinking to correct the man.
“Exactly,” Nicholas grinned, both faces struggling with each other to grin more convincingly.
“So you know why I’m here,” Dr. Fate replied, willing to accept the idea that Onokentauros could make such claims.
“You seek the Empty Space,” Nicholas said, sure of himself. “It’s the only reason anyone would ever know of me, much less seek me out.”
“You will assist me?” Fate asked, his hope growing as the sand castle had while he had slept.
“I will indeed. It’s why I’m still alive.”
Dr. Fate put on his helmet, looking as though he was a new man, no longer slouched in defeat but standing strong.
“Where is the Empty Space, Nicholas?” he asked, his voice once again hollow and cryptic thanks to the properties of the helmet.
Nicholas Onokentauros continued to smile as he gestured to Dr. Fate. “Why,” he announced, “its right in front of you.”
The sand castle was no mere sand castle, Fate realized.
“We’ll be well on our way as soon as our travelling companion arrives,” Onokentauros said as he admired his own handiwork. The intricacies of the castle were impressive even to him. He surprised himself with his skill; perhaps he had missed his true calling.
“When will that be?” Fate asked, impatience growing as quickly as his hope.
“If I timed it right, any second now.”
As if he were putting on a stage performance, Onokentauros walked to the edge of the beach, the ocean water, now calmed, splashed around his ankles as he raised his arms to the sky.
Both of his faces proclaimed to the clouds above, “KI-SI-KIL-LIL-LA-KE!!!!”
Onokentauros repeated the foreign word over and over again as the water before him began to change the course of its sway. In front of him, the ocean moved to the left and to the right as a channel began to open up. The water moved apart from the ocean, a gap growing quickly as the incantation to the skies continued. Nicholas Onokentauros was parting the sea.
Dr. Fate watched in awe as the waters raged on both sides of Onokentauros and he moved to get a better view. As he walked, his foot tapped the corner of the ornamental box that he was given to deliver. He picked it up and brushed it off, then walked behind Onokentauros.
The ocean walls grew a hundred feet straight up, the gap tunneling into the distance as far as the eye could see. Amidst the sea plants and sediment, there stood a lone figure facing directly at them. Dr. Fate recognized him immediately as the man began to walk intently toward them. Fifty paces from the beach, the man stopped and waited. Onokentauros continued his chant as Dr. Fate hovered to greet the man from the sea.
“Aquaman,” Dr. Fate stated as he landed in the soft sand that was once under water. “What do you have to do with any of this?”
Aquaman frowned beneath the stubble of his beard as he held out his prosthetic left hand to Dr. Fate.
“I believe you have something for me,” he stated. Unquestioning, Dr. Fate handed Aquaman the box.
To Be Continued…
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Doctor Fate had nothing but the abandoned Helm of Nabu and the nearly useless Amulet of Anubis. All he had lived for, all that he had loved was gone. As perhaps the universe’s most potentially devastating mystic, he was of no use to anyone, much less to the lost.
Friends were gone or he had forgotten them. Enemies stayed from his path, never thinking him to stop them. The power within him that he had gained as Doctor Fate was minimized to a single achievement. His previous life was washed away from his memory; he had but one desperate goal.
Months had passed and he had not spoken; alone for so long, he missed only one thing. He had been locked within the cellars and depths of his own tower franticly searching for the most elusive of incantations; the impossible spell. Through the millions of pages and ethereal texts that he had studied, little help came but for a few mentions of a singular intriguing possibility.
He learned of a place called the Empty Space. Throughout a four thousand year period, it was mentioned seven times in various and unrelated histories. A whisper in the secret vault deep within a buried catacomb beneath the Sahara, a simple children’s story for women to get their offspring to behave, a taboo subject deleted from the chronicled history of the lost civilization of Mu. A forbidden place written of in a chapter of the Holy Bible that no one was ever meant to read.
Doctor Fate (he hardly thought of himself as Hector Hall anymore) had seen terrible things in his recent life, from his resurrection from the dead to learning of the falsification of his beloved wife’s existence. It was the latter that drove him to what he had become; a shell of a man, a dwindling ember within the garments of a once powerful visage. He would regain the living soul of his dead wife or he would die. Nothing else mattered. It was that state of mind that drove him to what would change the face of reality forever.
No one knew who he was or where he came from, but everyone he met knew that whatever he had to say was imperative to hear. He said nothing of unimportance and often showed his presence when great dread loomed on the horizon. He had no name for which to call for him, he only arrived when it was destined. He was a Stranger that so many had acquainted, yet no one knew.
The Tower of Fate had fallen into disrepair, an immense obelisk of mystery and anonymity with no physical entrances, crumbling where it stood between folds of the dimensions. No man could enter, but the Phantom Stranger was no ordinary man if he was indeed a man at all. As he levitated inches above the quagmire of the mist and bog around him, he waved his hand wordlessly and entered into the Tower.
The brim of his hat shadowed his facial features as he moved through the labyrinthine confusion of the tower’s interior. Up was down and sideways, down was diagonal and equally as puzzling. It seemed as nothing to the Stranger as he went straight to his objective, the host and lone resident of the Tower of Fate.
“Doctor Fate!” the Stranger called out to everything within the structure, his voice carrying through the corridors and chambers of the vast arrangements. The tone he used was calm but firm, full of importance yet not urgent. It was a voice that could travel through the entire cosmos to be heard by its intended target.
The Stranger stood diagonal to the floor as Dr. Fate’s illusory image came into view. The blurred representation was faded and dull, as if Fate had trouble producing it.
“None are welcome here,” the hollow voice of Dr. Fate declared, “especially the likes of you, Phantom Stranger. You most of all.”
The Stranger stood firm despite the disorientation that was unavoidable throughout the tower as he faced the image of his host. “I must have been welcome here, Fate, or else I never could have entered,” he replied. “You know more than anyone that I only come in peace.”
“I don’t need your peace, Stranger!” Fate spat, instantly driven to anger. “Leave me be or you may force my hand!”
“You misunderstand, Fate,” the Stranger said, remaining as calm as before. “You may not need my peace but you do indeed need my assistance.”
Dr. Fate was silent for a moment, perhaps losing interest or perhaps considering the Stranger’s words. “You are not known to give assistance,” he said finally. “You only show yourself to speak cryptically and vanish indiscriminately.”
“This is different, Hector,” he responded, peculiarly using Fate’s given name. “You will need my help. I will tell you more if we were to meet face to face.”
The illusion of Dr. Fate vanished silently, leaving the Phantom Stranger alone for several moments. Ever patient, the Stranger stood; he had waited thousands of days for events to occur in times past, he could certainly wait a few minutes for Fate to physically arrive. Soon, a great door screeched open, rust particles tearing from the hinges as if the door was aged beyond its years. Dr. Fate staggered into the room slowly, as if drunken or fatigued to complete exhaustion.
“Speak,” Fate mumbled as he faced the Stranger. “I have little time for you. I must get back to my current projects with haste.”
“It will take the time it takes, Fate,” the Stranger said as he reached beneath his dark blue cloak. “No more, no less.”
From beneath his cloak, his white gloves hand pulled a small box, ornate and wooden, and held it in Fate’s direction. The box was the size of a shoebox adorned with coppery metallic trim and carved designs. The stranger said nothing until Fate moved to take it from him.
“You will meet two men,” the Phantom stranger warned. “This belongs to one of them.”
Dr. Fate took the box and weighed it in his hands. “You are mistaken,” he replied. “I have no intention of leaving this tower until I have achieved my objective. You waste your time here with me. I am no man’s courier.”
The Phantom Stranger, had he the capacity to smile, would have grinned and shook his head. “Perhaps you don’t realize the way the world works any longer, Dr. Fate. You are no longer in control of your own destiny. You, as I, are a cog in the great wheels of things beyond even my understanding. Are we all not just couriers for the ones that have granted us existence?”
Dr. Fate scoffed beneath his golden helmet at the idea. “You give me no good reason to disrupt my work here,” he said. “Why should I allow you to stay, let alone deliver this paltry gift box?”
The Stranger remained stone faced, emotionless. “You seek the Empty Space,” he began and watched Dr. Fate’s posture adjust involuntarily at the mention of the place. “One of these men that you will meet will show you how to get there. The other man will help you bring her back.”
Dr. Fate was silent as he digested the information. He shook the box gently as he considered his avenue of action. “You are not known to lie,” he spoke after a long pause, “and yet you are not known to speak so bluntly.”
“I do not lie,” the Stranger replied. “We must do as we must.”
“Then leave me to prepare,” Fate ordered as he turned from the Stranger back to his workplaces beyond the wall of reason. As Fate disappeared into a vast corridor, his long golden cloak flowing in the nonexistent wind, the Phantom Stranger let himself out of the structure, returning into the ethereal realm that birthed him.
Heavy black smoke from a fire swirled around the rock walls of a narrow cave, twisting its poisonous plumes out through a hole in the cavern’s ceiling. The crackle of the flame was drowned by the mumbling chants of the fire’s caretaker. Rattling a hollowed gourd filled with dried beans and singing indecipherably, the sun leathered man stopped instantly as he sensed he was no longer alone.
Smiling as he turned, he felt the inner twinge of a successfully fulfilled destiny. He rose from his seated position and stood before the flame.
The Phantom Stranger towered over the man, easily a foot taller, staring intently as the man aimed a pointed stick at his chest.
“I assume it has been done,” the man spoke to the Stranger, his dialect foreign to all but the Stranger. They both stood silently, the Stranger not answering.
“Your conversation is lacking,” the man said as he punctured the Stranger’s ribcage with the sharpened stick. “It is good that I no longer have a need of you, golem.”
As the stick was buried into the Stranger’s chest, his blue cloak dispersed into a mist and his flesh began to fester and melt from his skeleton. After a moment, the golem that had appeared to be the Phantom Stranger was reduced to nothing but the mound of clay of that which it had been created.
Manitou Raven poked the pile of clay with his medicine stick and smiled a yellow smile, his lips turning in ways that were long out of practice. “Dr. Fate is a bigger fool than I had foreseen,” he said to no one but himself and the ancient gods that watched over him. “It is now only a matter of time.”
Nicholas Onokentauros swallowed down his last bite of the finely sliced meat that was his dinner, washing it down with a long sip of aged red wine. Feeling mildly unsatisfied, he removed the cork from the wine bottle and poured himself another glass. Every time he dined and drank, he was left unsatisfied. Such was the life of a man with two faces.
After taking a brief drink, rolling it around in his mouth to savor the flavor of the vintage wine, he tipped the glass to his other mouth on the side of his head. As the second mouth drank, Nicholas resumed reading the book that he had gotten into before pausing to eat. Once the second mouth had consumed the entirety of the wine glass, the second face began reading a second book. Silently, this was how Nicholas Onokentauros lived his life.
Reading by the candle light as a storm rolled in from the sea, he was expecting a visitor and was growing impatient. Reading had kept his minds busy as he waited. He had not seen another living person in thirty-seven years.
“Do you think he’ll show up?” he asked himself from the side of his face.
“Of course he will,” his front face replied. “These things are set in stone. Haven’t you been listening?”
His side face grumbled. “The collar on this shirt keeps rubbing against my ear. It’s hard to hear out of the back of my head, especially when you’re talking out of the front of it.”
“You’d think you’d be used to it by now,” Onokentauros said. “Three thousand years and you still complain.”
“I will stop soon,” the second face responded. “All of our years studying and preparing are coming of age. Our guest will spin us into events that will finally free us.”
“Speaking of our guest, should we dress now for his arrival?”
The second face agreed and Onokentauros stood from his chair and grabbed the ornate cloak that hung from the golden hook of an antiquated coat rack. He swung it over his shoulder and pulled the hood to cover his head. He walked across the small circular room and surveyed himself in the mirror. He grinned menacingly to himself then smiled at the impressive menace that he could fake. He appeared relatively normal with the hood in place; no evidence was obvious to indicate his second face.
“Just once I’d like the hood to cover your face,” the second face complained, the voice muffled by the intrusive hood.
Dr. Fate hovered in place over the coastline of a barren, lifeless land. He watched as black waves crashed into the jagged crags, leaving beached ocean life to fend off the turmoil of a waterless existence. As far as the naked eye could see, there was nothing but a sole lighthouse on the coast, towering over the turbulent waters below, its yellow light signaling to no one. That was where he was going, but he hesitated, almost nervous.
He thought over the name in his head and how he had read vague mentions of it throughout his studies. He chalked Nicolas Onokentauros up to a mere fiction, a myth among millions of years of countless others. It seemed the Nicholas Onokentauros was as elusive as the Empty Space itself. Now he knew Onokentauros was real and he was about to meet him face to face. To face.
Onokentauros had, if the stories held true, been involved in several mythologies and legends over the past three thousand years. Always present but never seen, his actions always led to others fame and fortune or doom at the hands of enemies. It was said that he did nothing for himself; he lived only to glorify or destroy others as if fate dictated his motivations. Dr. Fate paused as he considered whether his affiliation with Onokentauros would lead to glory or to his utter destruction.
As Fate hovered contemplatively, he never saw Onokentauros streak from the upper window of the lighthouse on a high speed collision course. Fate was barreled from his distraction as Onokentauros tackled him from the sky. He soon came to his senses and realized that he was being attacked as the two entangled while they plummeted to the ground.
“I seek Nicholas Onokentauros,” Dr. Fate grunted, his breath almost knocked from his lungs.
Onokentauros maneuvered gracefully to get atop of Fate as they fell, positioned so that the brunt of the impact would be absorbed by his opponent. He smiled as Fate tried to free himself from Onokentauros’ grappling hold, his hidden second face smiling even broader.
“You seek the Empty Space,” Onokentauros replied as they neared the beach below. “I am a means to your ends. I know why you’re here, Dr. Fate.”
“Then why attack me?” Fate questioned.
“If I am going to help you,” Nicholas said from his second mouth, “then first I am going to have to hurt you.”
Before Fate could reply or escape, they hit the hard ground with a staggering impact. Fate instantly lost consciousness, too busy wrestling in mid-air to counter his attacker’s assault with a field of protection. His mind too cloudy from exhaustion, his attention too diverted with thoughts of his dead wife.
Nicholas Onokentauros rose nimbly from the impact unharmed, pulling back his hood as he stood over the incapacitated Dr. Fate. He quickly unfastened the Amulet of Anubis that hung from Fate’s neck and placed it into his pocket. He then removed Fate’s helmet and stared into the blank slivers of its eyes. He studied it intently for a long moment before showing it to his other face, who studied it further.
“It is as you suspected,” the second face said. “There’s nothing in here anymore. Nabu and its prisoners have vacated the realm within the Helm.”
“That will definitely make things easier,” the first face replied.
“And also more difficult.”
“True,” the first face said. “Always on the lookout for the bright side, you are.”
“I try,” the side face said as Onokentauros knelt to Fate’s body once again, pulling the ornamented box from an invisible pocket within the lining of Fate’s cape. He held it to his front face and jiggled the contents inside.
“See?” the second face said. “It’s all going accordingly as he said.”
“Ready for our second guest?” the first face asked as he tried to place the sound of the contents inside the box. It reminded him of a box full of playing dice or a collection of small stones and pebbles.
“Let’s wake our sleeping friend first,” the second face recommended. “I’d hate for him to miss the big show. It’s not often I get to show off in front of people.”
“I know how that goes,” Nicholas said as he lowered himself into a seated position next to the fallen Dr. Fate. He crossed his legs and leaned his elbows into the sand behind him as he watched the storm clouds roil amongst themselves, clashing ribbons of lightning into each other as the formations moved. To pass the time, Onokentauros hummed a tune to himself, his other face providing a flawlessly perfect harmony.
Hector Hall crept back to consciousness in the sand, disoriented and mildly lost. It took him an uncomfortably long time to remember where he was and why he had ended up there. Rubbing his bruised ribs, he sat up. He could not see, at first glance, Nicholas Onokentauros; all he could see was the massive structure built in the sand in front of him.
“I built a sand castle while you were out,” Onokentauros said from behind Dr. Fate. “I got bored.”
He moved in front of Fate and dumped a bucket full of sand at the base of the sprawling castle, shaping it skillfully into the shape of an adjacent bungalow to the mighty fortress.
“Hope you don’t mind, I used your helmet,” Nicholas smiled as he scooped another helmet full of sand to add to the castle. In all the ways that Fate could conceive to use the legendary Helm of Nabu, a bucket was not one of them.
“I’ll need that back,” Fate said as he inspected the sand structure. It was much more complex than he had initially thought, with individual rooms within the sand windows, an interior build inside. Walls and furniture made from the sand decorated and accented everything. Dr. Fate looked closer for people.
“Amazing,” he muttered.
“Thanks,” Onokentauros replied as he continued to build. “It’s been a while since I’ve been outside. I haven’t had the opportunity to create anything in quite some time.”
Onokentauros paused and stared at Dr. Fate, who was completely enraptured in the complexity of the sand castle. The expression on Fate’s face gave Nicholas a great sense of pride. He knew that after all of these years, he still had it.
“You’re Nicholas Onokentauros,” Dr. Fate said after a prolonged silence.
“That’s correct,” Nicholas said as he dumped the remaining sand from the golden helmet and handed it back to Dr. Fate. “And since you know who I am, I’ll assume that I know why you’re here.”
“You knew I was coming?”
“I’ve known that you were coming before your parents were born,” Onokentauros boasted.
“My parents have been continually reincarnated after every life cycle for the last three thousand years,” Dr. Fate said, thinking to correct the man.
“Exactly,” Nicholas grinned, both faces struggling with each other to grin more convincingly.
“So you know why I’m here,” Dr. Fate replied, willing to accept the idea that Onokentauros could make such claims.
“You seek the Empty Space,” Nicholas said, sure of himself. “It’s the only reason anyone would ever know of me, much less seek me out.”
“You will assist me?” Fate asked, his hope growing as the sand castle had while he had slept.
“I will indeed. It’s why I’m still alive.”
Dr. Fate put on his helmet, looking as though he was a new man, no longer slouched in defeat but standing strong.
“Where is the Empty Space, Nicholas?” he asked, his voice once again hollow and cryptic thanks to the properties of the helmet.
Nicholas Onokentauros continued to smile as he gestured to Dr. Fate. “Why,” he announced, “its right in front of you.”
The sand castle was no mere sand castle, Fate realized.
“We’ll be well on our way as soon as our travelling companion arrives,” Onokentauros said as he admired his own handiwork. The intricacies of the castle were impressive even to him. He surprised himself with his skill; perhaps he had missed his true calling.
“When will that be?” Fate asked, impatience growing as quickly as his hope.
“If I timed it right, any second now.”
As if he were putting on a stage performance, Onokentauros walked to the edge of the beach, the ocean water, now calmed, splashed around his ankles as he raised his arms to the sky.
Both of his faces proclaimed to the clouds above, “KI-SI-KIL-LIL-LA-KE!!!!”
Onokentauros repeated the foreign word over and over again as the water before him began to change the course of its sway. In front of him, the ocean moved to the left and to the right as a channel began to open up. The water moved apart from the ocean, a gap growing quickly as the incantation to the skies continued. Nicholas Onokentauros was parting the sea.
Dr. Fate watched in awe as the waters raged on both sides of Onokentauros and he moved to get a better view. As he walked, his foot tapped the corner of the ornamental box that he was given to deliver. He picked it up and brushed it off, then walked behind Onokentauros.
The ocean walls grew a hundred feet straight up, the gap tunneling into the distance as far as the eye could see. Amidst the sea plants and sediment, there stood a lone figure facing directly at them. Dr. Fate recognized him immediately as the man began to walk intently toward them. Fifty paces from the beach, the man stopped and waited. Onokentauros continued his chant as Dr. Fate hovered to greet the man from the sea.
“Aquaman,” Dr. Fate stated as he landed in the soft sand that was once under water. “What do you have to do with any of this?”
Aquaman frowned beneath the stubble of his beard as he held out his prosthetic left hand to Dr. Fate.
“I believe you have something for me,” he stated. Unquestioning, Dr. Fate handed Aquaman the box.
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To Be Continued…
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